Monthly Archives: March 2013

Cohen’s meticulousness pays off. While he could present a clear night sky taken at any latitude, he instead captures the very night sky that, in megacities, is hidden from sight. The photographer keeps some details of his process a secret, it seems. So, I can only suspect that Cohen takes his picture of a city, determines what the night sky looks like in that city on that day and then quickly travels to a remote area to find the same night sky viewed from a different location. This precision makes all the difference.

I still haven’t experienced that sort of night sky directly, but those beautiful composite photos will suffice for now.

If tomorrow, miraculously, everyone on planet Earth achieved enlightenment / nirvana / liberation / Buddha-hood, how would we then go about our lives? Remember, this would be the real deal – the reordering of consciousness, not a Hollywood transformation wherein we would all vanish in a flash of light. Despite realising our true Buddha nature, we would still need to live, society would still need to function. But how would a society of Buddhas organize itself?

…I posit that the society that emerges would look very similar to what is commonly described as Communist (and real Communism at that, not the cartoonish scare story paraded by the right). I can’t for the life of me think of any other possibility, can you?

That depends. Is enlightenment a path or a destination?

Let me put it this way. When I started reading books about Buddhism in my adolescence, I quickly began to notice that there were two main types of them. One type was what I started to think of as “religious” Buddhism. There was a lot of recitation, in a more formal way, of the Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, etc., a lot more emphasis on correct ritual behavior. The other type, which I greatly preferred, was what I thought of as “philosophical” Buddhism, exemplified in my eyes by people like Alan Watts, Steve Hagen, Stephen Batchelor, Sam Hamill and Owen Flanagan.

If I may generalize here for brevity’s sake, the religious form is primarily concerned with ethics, with ending suffering in all its guises. This is how enlightened people should behave. Follow these rules to achieve these goals. The philosophical form, though, is more of a radical method of inquiry. It marries Buddhist insights and techniques to Western empirical reasoning. The goal of one’s practice is to see reality as clearly as possible, whatever that may entail, and to avoid reifying abstract concepts. No action, however well-intentioned, will be of any real use if rooted in ignorance and hazy vision.

The religious form is a form of motivated reasoning. It takes for granted that the purpose of people’s discipline and ritual practice is to bring them to the point where they accept the preordained conclusion. The philosophical form holds out the possibility that truth-seeking and ethical harmony may not be perfectly compatible. Sometimes truth and honesty can create conflicts. Sometimes lies and illusions can maintain peace and stability. Where is the perspective from which we can judge when one or the other is called for?

Nowadays, I find it gets closer to what I feel is the heart of the matter to think of this as a division between rationalism and empiricism, especially since the same division presents itself in many other contexts besides Buddhism (this is largely the reason why I’m curious to read Michael Oakeshott and see what his take on this was all about). Rationalism concerns itself more with internal consistency between principles, whereas empiricism is more content to accept contradictions or incoherence on an intellectual level as long as a situation “works” somehow. We can never have all the relevant information necessary in order to make a fully informed decision, and yet our imperfect decisions nonetheless create new ripples of causation in the world which multiply exponentially. We can never devise the perfect system which, when implemented properly and administered diligently, will eliminate conflict and inefficiency. We just muddle through the best we can, teetering and tottering in an attempt to keep our balance.

So I agree that universal Buddhist enlightenment and “pure” Communism would be very similar. However, I think that’s because both of them are rationalist abstractions. They both dream of a grand synthesis in which all the conflicts of human society are resolved. They believe in the existence of an ultimate perspective which, when obtained, will reconcile dramatically different human desires, with each individual recognizing exactly what needs to be done in their own lives toward that shared goal. In their own ways, both views see life as a problem to be solved.

Sam Harris, while promoting his book The Moral Landscape, used an example to illustrate the difference between questions that are answerable in theory vs. answerable in practice. How many birds are in flight above the Earth at this moment? The answer, whatever it is, does indeed exist, even if we don’t know it. There are a finite number of birds on Earth, and if we had the means to monitor every inch of the planet and its atmosphere, we could conceivably find a true answer to that question. Obviously, though, the practical obstacles to doing so are insurmountable.

And that’s a situation which would only require the relatively straightforward actions of observing and counting. Imagine, then, the infinitely more complicated scenario of trying to anticipate every single situation that could bring individuals or groups of people into conflict and trying to enact preventive measures. Even if it is conceivable in theory, it doesn’t seem remotely possible in practice.

Ruairí’s original question implied that enlightenment was a state of being that, when authentically realized, necessarily resulted in harmoniously integrated human interactions. But what if enlightenment is simply the realization that conflict and suffering are ineradicable ingredients in life, which can only at best be contained, never overcome completely? What if, instead of ironclad logical necessity, enlightenment reveals neverending Sisyphean struggle?

People look at an issue like marriage equality, and the first inclination is to set prescriptive norms. We should do something, the justices should rule a certain way, you should support a given cause. But based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do — it’s to tell them what other people actually do.

And you know what will accomplish that? That’s right. Everyone on Facebook making their opinions on the issue immediately, graphically, demonstrably obvious. That is literally all that it takes to create a descriptive norm: Publicly acknowledging your belief along with the thousands of other people who are also publicly acknowledging theirs.

So, no. The fact that you’ve replaced that picture of yourself mugging for the camera with a red square and an equal sign will not cause Justice Kennedy to bang his gavel or stomp his foot and say that he’s come to a final decision on the matter, and that it’s all because of your new profile picture. Changing your Facebook image will not have a direct impact on our legislation.

But a widespread descriptive norm implying that it is socially acceptable to advocate for same-sex marriage and that most people in contemporary American society seem to be pro-marriage-equality? Now that just might.

Way back in the day, I remember reading a newsletter from the people behind Vegan Outreach, in which they outlined their plan for the veganization of the world. You see, if each person reading this could simply convince five other people to become vegan, and then each of those five people could convince five more apiece, well, you get the idea. The whole world would be vegan by the year such-and-such. Of course, the obvious objection that even I was able to articulate at the time was that, in real life, most people’s social circles are tightly constrained enough so that without some seriously die-hard witnessing to hostile audiences, most of these activists were just going to end up talking to each other. The circles expand outward to a certain point, and then the walls just become higher.

The Spleen: What? What are you talking about? You lifted a bus once!The Blue Raja: Yes, precisely! That story’s legend’ry!Mr. Furious: Yeah… It was really more of a…
[waves hand sideways]Mr. Furious: … a push, really, than a lift.The Shoveler: That still takes INCREDIBLE super-human strength.The Blue Raja: Indeed, it does! To push an entire bus out of the way.Mr. Furious: Well, actually, the driver kinda had his foot on the accelerator… JUST in the beginning; just to get it going. Then it actually was me. But he kinda…

In the case of gay marriage, the driver’s had his foot on the accelerator for a few decades now, and it’s more than a bit absurd to see people desperate to justify their clicktivism by reframing the story around the “push” they gave it. Social conformity and peer pressure can certainly help solidify gains, but those gains themselves require a lot more than just bumper-sticker proclamations of belief.

Several of Oakeshott’s essays were re-published in Rationalism and Politics in 1962. They argued against the influence of a certain kind of ‘rationalism’, an ideology infecting much of modern life and politics in particular. It had surfaced clearly in the works of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, but was furthered by many French Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire. The essays indicted the ‘sovereignty of technique’ and the rationalist faith ‘in unhindered reason’ as ‘an infallible guide in political activity’ capable of application to any situation. Oakeshott countered that the study of politics involved contemplation of ‘practical’ activity and not ‘scientific’ investigation.

Rationalism in Politics brought him to a wider but still limited audience. His readership was not broad, especially in America, where conservative thought was, and remains, of a more evangelical or economic libertarian bent. The book reinforced a central thesis that a widespread style of rationalism informing much of post-Renaissance culture failed to acknowledge that experience of human affairs was a far better guide to action than the resort to ideological formulae.

So what is rationalism, in the Oakeshottian sense of the term? First, it involves the claim that the only adequate type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of rules, principles, or methods—and thus it is also a claim that “knowing how” to do something is nothing more than “knowing that” the rules are such and such. Second, because of this denigration of practical knowledge, it is a claim that rational action can only take place following the creation of a theoretical model. As Oakeshott once observed, modern rationalism is literally “preposterous” because theoretical reflection can only occur after a practice already has made itself distinct and more or less concrete.

Finally, as Callahan points out, since rationalism is a mistaken description of human knowledge and its relation to human activity, it is also an impossible way of acting, politically or in any other sphere. Human action, including political action, is inherently an engagement of practical reason working within a particular tradition or and attempting to follow through on some of the inchoate suggestions that the vagueness of the practice offers. The opposite of rationalism for Oakeshott is not irrationalism but authentic practical reasonableness. Thus, and contrary to many of his reading-impaired critics, his critique of rationalism is not a critique of reason but a defense of it against a false modern conception of it.

To use one of Oakeshott’s favorite examples, if one has no knowledge of cookery, a cookbook is useless. If, on the other hand, one is an experienced chef, a cookbook is superfluous. The cookbook is relevant only in a situation where either the great majority of cooks are relatively inexperienced and there is a dearth of connoisseurs or in a situation in which the traditions of cookery are in a state of confusion and a reminder is needed of some of the tradition’s neglected resources.

Oakeshott used the term “ideology” to describe the attempted application of this rationalistic style to political activity. The rationalist’s or ideologist’s desire is to solve permanently the problems of political life and leave everything else to administration. Yet politics isn’t concerned with the search for truth. Instead, as Oakeshott noted, “it is concerned with the cultivation of what from time to time are accepted as the peaceable decencies of conduct among men who do not suffer from the Puritan-Jacobin illusion that in practical affairs there is an attainable condition of things called ‘truth’ or ‘perfection.’”

The most difficult of Oakeshott’s works is On Human Conduct. Its argument is complex and couched in a technical vocabulary borrowed from Latin. Not surprisingly, it has been widely misunderstood. O’Sullivan’s essay is a most illuminating explanation of what the book is about. I recommend it without reservation to all who want to understand Oakeshott’s magnum opus. One of the many virtues of O’Sullivan’s essay is that it avoids the obscurity of the book. But it is far more than merely exegetical. It considers the main criticisms of Oakeshott’s argument and shows that they either rest on misunderstanding, or are easily countered by a deeper understanding of the argument. O’Sullivan then states and considers what he takes to be the most serious problems with Oakeshott’s argument. Chief among them is Oakeshott’s realization, reached during the years before his death, that the likelihood is virtually non-existent that the political arrangements he has favored would be approximated in the conditions that prevail in the Western world. O’Sullivan movingly describes the disappointment and sadness to which this realization had led Oakeshott and would lead those who share his political outlook. The emerging view is not tragic, but an elegiac lament for what might have been but will not be.

I’ve been seeing Oakeshott’s name crop up on a regular basis recently, including a couple parallels drawn between his work and Isaiah Berlin’s, so I’m looking forward to checking him out sometime. I’m given to understand that Andrew Sullivan considers himself something of a disciple, which in itself is hardly a glowing endorsement, but getting back to the plus side, I’m also interested to see how his critique of rationalism resembles Evgeny Morozov’s recent writings on “solutionism”.

It was only after I finished studying history (or to give it another name, ‘Western notions of cause-and-effect’) and began to study Zen Buddhism that some kind of meaningful answer began to occur to me. No one could resolve the question of free will versus determinism because, fundamentally, it was the wrong question. The real question was not: Do I have a choice? Rather it was: Who is the ‘me’ that’s asking if I have a choice?

If there is no ‘I’ to make a choice, then there is only one process going on — that of existence as a whole. No one­ — no fate, or brute circumstance — is pushing you around because there is no one to be pushed around. Or to put it another way, you are both simultaneously the one who is doing the pushing and the one who is being pushed. To think of this process in another way, consider your breathing: are ‘you’ breathing, or is breathing happening to you?

Let’s face it: Technology and etiquette have been colliding for some time now, and things have finally boiled over if the recent spate of media criticisms is anything to go by. There’s the voicemail, not to be left unless you’re “dying.” There’s the e-mail signoff that we need to “kill.” And then there’s the observation that what was once normal — like asking someone for directions — is now considered “uncivilized.”

Cyber-savvy folks are arguing for such new etiquette rules because in an information-overloaded world, time-wasting communication is not just outdated — it’s rude. But while living according to the gospel of technological efficiency and frictionless sharing is fine as a Silicon Valley innovation ethos, it makes for a downright depressing social ethic.

People like Nick Bilton over at The New York Times Bits blog argue that norms like thank-you messages can cost more in time and efficiency than they are worth. However, such etiquette norms aren’t just about efficiency: They’re actually about building thoughtful and pro-social character.

Let’s look at the cast of characters involved in this “thing” (since it appears to be an official thing now): that sociopath from a couple weeks ago in the NYT, a bubblegum-popping ditz from Gawker (is that redundant?), and some jerkoff from Slate being criticized (rightly) by a writer at Wired. Not a particularly representative slice of humanity, you might say. In fact, you might suggest, as I did, that it’s really more a case of young, tech-savvy, social media narcissists talking to themselves, helping to convince each other that their narrow little fraction of a world is the only one that matters.

I will say this, though, about how the times-they-are-a-changing. Long story short, yesterday I found myself with a couple hours to kill before clocking in, so I went across the street to mosey through the mall. Both the bookstores, the B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks, that used to be there were gone, of course. So was the Sam Goody’s music store that I used to haunt throughout my adolescence. But I counted four cellphone kiosks, a Best Buy Mobile store, a Radio Shack which seemed to be much more phone-oriented than I ever remember them being, and a cash-for-used-cellphone depository. I almost felt like falling into step with the elderly power-walkers making their morning rounds to share stories about the good old days.

“When we think about loneliness and social isolation, we often think of them as two faces of the same coin,” says Andrew Steptoe, a psychologist and epidemiologist at University College London, who led the study. But the findings suggest that a lack of social interaction harms health whether or not a person feels lonely, he says. “When you’re socially isolated, you not only lack companionship in many cases, but you may also lack advice and support from people.”

The findings contradict two recent studies that suggest loneliness is associated with declining health and increased mortality in older people. “I think it’s kind of a puzzle that we now need to solve,” says John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, and a co-author of one of the earlier studies. He says more work is needed to understand cultural factors that may influence results, such as differences in the way people report loneliness.

Cacioppo, eh? I remember him, and it looks like he still bears keeping a suspicious eye on. Look, buddy, I appreciate your concern, but as I demurred perviously, I get plenty of eudaimonic sustenance from online interactions, and frankly, I would gleefully trade a few additional years of statistical existence for the privilege of being left alone to enjoy the life I do have. The tone of this makes me think that sooner or later, somebody’s going to be strongly urging that people like me make living adjustments for our own good as defined by somebody else.

It is still worth distinguishing between the slacker, of any description, and the idler. Slacking lacks a commitment to an alternative scale of value. By contrast, the genius of the genuine idler, whether as described by Diogenes or Jerome K. Jerome, is that he or she is not interested in work at all, but instead devoted to something else. What that something else involves is actually less important than the structural defection from the values of working. In other words, idling might involve lots of activity, even what appears to be effort; but the essential difference is that the idler does whatever he or she does in a spirit of infinite and cheerful uselessness that is found in all forms of play.

Idling at once poses a challenge to the reductive, utilitarian norms that otherwise govern too much of human activity and provides an answer—or at least the beginning of one—to the question of life’s true purpose. It is not too much to suggest that being idle, in the sense of enjoying one’s open-ended time without thought of any specific purpose or end, is the highest form of human existence. This is, to use Aristotelian language, the part of ourselves that is closest to the divine, and thus offers a glimpse of immortality. To be sure, from this Olympian vantage we may spy new purposes and projects to pursue in our more workaday lives; but the value of these projects, and the higher value from which these are judged, can be felt only when we slip the bonds of use.

And thus the same old urge to strive after status and accomplishment reasserts itself. You see, I’m not merely lazy or unproductive, I’m an authentic genius who has realized the true purpose of life, scaled the Olympian heights in order to take in the breathtaking sight of human existence from its proper perspective. This is the sort of thing that drove Lao-tzu to the city gates, muttering to himself with his eyes on the mountains ahead.

I don’t fundamentally disagree with anything he says here, of course. But when he takes such care to distinguish slacking from idling as if the former is merely the right action done for the wrong reason, it makes me just a bit leery. That way lies respectability and productivity. If you want to dissent from society’s view on the value of labor, you have to accept the scorn and disregard that come with it.

Veblen, after his fashion a sharp critic of capitalism but always more cynical than the socialist dreamers, demonstrated how minute divisions of leisure time could be used to demonstrate social superiority, no matter what the form or principle of social organization; but he was no more able than Marx to see how ingenious capitalist market forces could be in adapting to changing political environments. For instance, neither of them sensed what we now know all too well, namely that democratizing access to leisure would not change the essential problems of distributive justice. Being freed from drudgery only so that one may shop or be entertained by movies and sports, especially if this merely perpetuates the larger cycles of production and consumption, is hardly liberation. In fact, “leisure time” becomes here a version of the company store, where your hard-won scrip is forcibly swapped for the very things you are working to make.

What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.

You’ve gotta pity these poor bastards. I mean, imagine being so insecure, so incapable of contemplative self-confidence, so desperate for some sort of tangible proof of your non-sexist or non-racist intentions that you attach this overweening significance to whichever metric you can get your hands on. Yes! That’s it! 43% of the music I listen to is created and performed by non-white non-North Americans! 51% of the books I read are by female authors! Woohoo, I’m winning at cosmopolitanism! Winning like Charlie Sheen! The numbers don’t lie!

(Would it fuck with their heads too badly if someone were to suggest that obsessing over stats and pie charts is so typically white male?)

One thing I didn’t mention the last time this topic came up: I find it interesting that it’s just matter-of-factly assumed that male reviewers and readers would naturally gravitate toward the writings of other males. Why? Because of pheromones? No, seriously, every time I read one of these whinges, that’s presented as the default, the unconscious state of things requiring education to overcome: men naturally consider other men’s writing to be superior to women’s even when it’s “clearly” not. Conversely, though, white knights like this guy do seem to believe that women possess some sorts of unique ways of knowing, experiencing and communicating, which suggests that there’s very little daylight between their views and those they scorn, like, say, V.S. Naipaul. The narcissism of small differences, indeed.

But leaving aside the extremely tendentious attempt to interpret everything from ideas to language as “gendered” by society, doesn’t this quite literally — not figuratively, but literally — beg the question? Doesn’t it, in other words, presuppose the existence of a more-or-less zero-sum struggle between men and women for power, status and resources, one which all the participants are instinctively aware of and one where their natural inclination is to stand in solidarity with their fellows? In other other words, aren’t you simply finding the “proof” you set directly out in search of to begin with, that men see themselves as directly competing against women in the war of language and ideas because misogyny that’s why? In a world of unlimited writerly wants and scarce publishing resources, we dudes are all brothers of different mothers, amirite?

Oh, well. This is just one of those things that gets magnified far out of proportion to its actual importance, most likely due to the massive overrepresentation of frustrated lit majors tweeting away on the social web, bitter over their lack of an actual literary career. The real fun will begin when the other dozen genders plus the otherkin start hollering about how they’re being systematically overlooked by the cisbinary publishing industry, and the postmodern Ouroboros will finally finish what it started.

My piece of technological wonderment is small and black and helps tell time like a watch. That’s because it technically is a watch, in principle, but it’s not like any you’ve ever seen. And it’s a whole lot more than just that.

Meet the Pebble, a piece of wearable tech that is part of an ever-expanding yet-to-be-released line of products lumped into the 21st-century category of “smartwatch.” The term implies, of course, that all other watches that came before are technophobic Neanderthals, capable only of ticking away the seconds toward their eventual irrelevance.

Several months ago, I was incredulous and scornful of the idea that anyone could honestly attempt to argue that emailing was a time- and labor-intensive process. Now, after reading the above article, which teeters vertiginously on the ledge of self-parody, it seems obvious to me that I’ve actually been observing something strangely akin to the famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which ever-shrinking divisions of time are proportionately overhyped in a futile attempt to close the distance on a life containing meaning and significance.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.